On Sunday, we met Paul, Jen and the beautiful Jill at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge and walked to Brooklyn.  Boy, it’s busy on a Sunday.  Bikes, people, strollers.  However it was a fantastic day and we got great views.  Here’s the two of us at the middle of the bridge  with Jen and Jill on the left.  Statue of Liberty in the background.  The classic Brooklyn Bridge shot.

Sunday the 4th was the Atlantic Antic 2009 on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.  They shut down maybe 20 or 30 blocks of Atlantic Ave and it’s just one huge street fair.  Food, shops, drink, everything there is outdoors for the day.  A really great New Yorky experience.  We drank beer, we ate food, we went to the old fashioned bus exhibition (!).  Jill was very keen on going on the bus.

Then we ate bacon at a place which smoked its own bacon.  Mmmm pork products.

We said goodbye to Jen and Jill and Paul and headed back over to Chinatown where we had dinner for about 25p and it was the largest amount of food I’ve ever seen.  Since we were playing at being tourists, we just had to go to Times Square and look at the lights and take pictures and so we have the classic “thumbs up in Times Square” picture below.

A selection of the rest of the pictures are in this Windows Live photoalbum.  I guess it isn’t as good as Flickr or whatever but seems to work for me.

View Full Album

The monetary density of things – Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

This is a fabulous article about how expensive things are per pound starting at flour and ending at antimatter.  A bit geeky but nice.

around the picture is fairly good and you can adjust the margins to make it look even better.  I suspect that there will be some irritations with Live Writer which will involve how it interacts with the Wordpress blog but I can probably live with that. 

One thing that’s slightly irritating is when you want to add a hyperlink to the post when you’re off line.  Of course, this isn’t the fault of Live Writer.  If you know the URL or it’s in your history then you can paste it in but otherwise if you really want a link to some web site then it’s probably best to put in a tag and wait until just before you publish on-line to update it. 

The program is really easy to use although it’s a bit of a mistake to put the help for an offline blogging program on line.

Let’s try a table.

Table Entry 1	Table Entry 2
$1,000	$3,200
$1,001	$3,201

Well that’s easy.  Maps, pictures, tables, links, tags.  Everything you really need. 

I’ve been trying to work out what the “blog this” stuff does.  There’s a button on IE7.0 in the Tools menu which allows you to blog a web link pretty quickly.  Obviously this is an on line tool but it’s easy to use.

I’ve now added a really big picture with a link through to the original.  The first thing to do is to see whether or not the editing on the picture is done on the original, a copy or just the thumbnail which is included in the blog post.  I would hope that the editing is done throughout but on a local copy.  It looks like it’s a local copy because the offline post file on my local hard drive is 5.24mb which sort of has to include the original.   The watermarking is good but the various effects (here it’s sepia and emboss) are a bit cheesy.  It looks like one of those pictures on the front of the Wall Street Journal.  It’s kind of nice to have the linking all done correctly though and it does make for a simple way of adding pictures and tables and maps.  I can’t get the text.  Here’s a quote

George Bush said “argle fargle bargle” when he was looking at The Kirks Blog.  Mr Bush’s press spokesman later said that the President was “feeling poorly”.  He also asked whether or not it was possible to put a block quote inside a quote.  It isn’t.

And so a quote has appeared.   Nice.

trying to take on Google by adding map features.

Our House (in the middle of our street…thank you Madness)

So that solves some problems for the Africa trip which might stress the system a bit since it’s unlikely we’re going to have much online access in Namibia.

before it’s sent

It’s the leaning tower of Pisa.

I think I’m going to have to actually get in there and edit a theme. It’s just too much of a pain arseing around trying to fine one that looks reasonable.